An After-School Fight Leaves One Youth Dead, Other in Jail

Saturday

Aug 9, 2008 at 9:31 PMJan 13, 2017 at 6:00 PM

This Wednesday, Tarrod Russell will face a hard decision: accept 10.3 years in prison for manslaughter or go to trial on charges of second-degree murder. What led him here, according to police, was a fatal fight after school.

BY SHOSHANA WALTER THE LEDGER

LAKELAND | The knife went in easy, deeper than Tarrod Russell expected.

He pulled it out and ran. Threw the knife, pumped his legs, flew through it all. The screaming kids, the school and the playground, the homes and trees and cars and bicycles.

Thirteen-year-old Kristian Marrero-Cassola staggered toward his home and collapsed on the ground, 10 feet from his apartment door. There was a towel, pressed against the wound. His 10-year-old brother and friends, calling his name.

An hour-and-a-half later, 14-year-old Tarrod was in handcuffs, charged with murder.

* * *

This Wednesday, Tarrod Russell will face a hard decision: accept 10.3 years in prison for manslaughter or go to trial on charges of second-degree murder.

What led him here, according to police, was another choice.

On Dec. 5, Tarrod and Kristian got into a fight after school.

The two classmates at Southwest Middle in Lakeland did not know much about each other.

It started with rumors and escalated into something more. Kristian thought Tarrod had stolen his belt. Tarrod thought Kristian wanted to jump him.

They'd never fought before, but their two groups of friends had problems.

The kids called it a race thing. Tarrod, who is black, hung out with black kids. Kristian, who was Cuban and had lived in the United States a little shy of two years, hung out with Hispanics.

Southwest Middle officials say it wasn't a race thing. It was a kid thing, a pride thing, a turf thing. Fights are common in middle school.

Whatever the cause, the fight did not end well. A couple of minutes in, police say, Tarrod pulled a knife and stabbed Kristian once in the lower left side of his abdomen.

That turned the after-school brawl into something more serious: a murder case involving two youths that affected their families and their communities - the school, a church raising a generation of black youth, and Hispanic immigrants of Polk County.

Race thing or not, their story is a tale of two lives - one Cuban, the otherblack - and two lives lost.

One dead, the other behind bars.

* * *

Tarrod Russell never saw much of his parents.

Not long after he was born, his father, 19-year-old Johnny Russell, went to prison for manslaughter, where he would return three times more.

His mother, Jacquelyn Starks, a 21-year-old single mother with five other sons by three men, didn't have a job and was raising the children on her own. When Tarrod was 11 months old, one of his half-brothers hit him in the eye with the metal buckle of a sandal.

At the time, Tarrod's eye seemed OK, recalled Starks, whose nickname is Deedee and who now goes by her married name of Atkins. Besides, without a car or a license or money, where would she go? She didn't take him to the doctor.

A few days later, Tarrod's grandmother noticed his eye looked red and watery. She took him to the hospital, where she was told the eye was infected.

Doctors said they would not be able to save it. Tarrod's right eye would go blind.

By then, Atkins was no longer with Johnny. She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter, Brittnay, by another father. And she had been charged with cocaine possession and driving without a license. The incident with Tarrod brought the Department of Children and Families to her door.

All six sons were taken out of Atkins' care and placed into the arms of their paternal grandmothers. As Atkins battled drug-related charges, check fraud, evictions and other challenges, her boys were raised by four other women.

Tarrod went to Antoinette "Annette" Austin, Johnny Russell's mother, and the court ordered Atkins to pay $33 a week in child support.

She didn't always make it.

* * *

For the most part, Kristian Marrero-Cassola and his family led a happy life in Cuba, well-documented in photo albums, scrapbooks and pictures dotting the walls and surfaces of his mother's Lakeland apartment.

In Quemado de Güines, Kristian and his younger half-brother Kenny lived with their mother Katia Cassola, a former third-grade teacher, and Kenny's father, an ambulance driver.

But the family was poor. His mother knew there were other options.

A couple of her brothers had already traveled to the United States and found success - or at least, something better. In the United States, they could get anything they needed. In Cuba, even simple items, like toilet paper and toothpaste, were difficult to afford.

So Katia submitted herself and her two children in the visa lottery, the only way she knew she'd be able to get to the United States legally.

The two boys were not too sad about the thought of leaving home for a foreign place, Katia recalled. Other people had made this journey. They knew family awaited them in the United States, and they had each other.

On Jan. 5, 2005, Katia left the boys' two fathers behind and brought Kenny and Kristian with her to the United States.

The three moved to Lakeland, where Katia's brothers lived. Kristian entered sixth grade at Crystal Lake Middle School, and Kenny entered fourth. They were fluent only in Spanish.

Katia thought it would be difficult for her children to make the transition into life in the United States, and in some ways it was. The three moved so much that Kristian switched schools four times. Kenny had to repeat a grade. Kristian passed school but got into at least one fight. They were all babies, said Katia, learning how to walk and talk again. But the two boys grew quickly.

Kristian found comfort in numbers with friends from Cuba, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Together, they navigated their new culture and language while preserving a sense of their past.

"LWP," for "Latin with pride," decorated their MySpace profiles, and the same phrase was carved into Kristian's left forearm, alongside the scarred carving of a winged "K."

The boys talked in Spanish together. Kristian emulated his favorite reggaeton artists, who were all Puerto Rican. He'd shaved his head like Daddy Yankee and called himself "El Matatan," loosely translated as "the Man," after Wisin, one-half the reggaeton duo Wisin y Yandel. Even though he was Cuban, the music spoke to him. He rapped his own lyrics, and a friend posted videos on MySpace.

While Katia took low-paying jobs with long hours, leaving no time or need to learn English, Kristian and Kenny spoke and wrote in a language she could not understand.

She hated that she couldn't help them with some of their homework. Sometimes they spoke English in the house, and she didn't know what they were saying. Later, when hundreds of classmates sent letters written in English after Kristian's death, she couldn't read them.

For about two months before the fight, the three had been living in an apartment complex on Beacon Road, where most tenants spoke only Spanish. Many came and went, unable to afford the $450 per month rent.

Katia was working a $7.56-an-hour job at a ham-packing factory in Lakeland and could not be at home when her sons returned from school.

They were left to themselves.

* * *

Annette Austin loved Tarrod Russell, there was no doubt. But she was not well.

For Tarrod's entire life, Austin had had an invisible illness. Congestive heart failure slowed her body, while inside, her heart labored overtime to pump enough blood through her organs.

But she still cooked a lot at home, drove a car and did chores. She was also active in church. While she was well, Tarrod went with her.

Tarrod liked church. He'd see his aunts and cousins there, hang out with friends and greet his old teachers from St. Luke's Academy, where he had attended third and fourth grades. He was eager to please, better at math than spelling and aspired one day to run his own trucking company. He liked it when teachers asked him if he needed help. He never asked for it himself.

At the church, he'd sing in the choir and serve as an usher. But in recent years Austin's health had worsened. She became less involved. As a result, so did Tarrod.

The family never had much money. A construction worker, Tarrod's grandfather was usually working and hardly around. Because of her illness, Austin never worked.

She was always short of breath, tired, in and out of the hospital. Tarrod would help her out of bed or to her seat on the living room couch. Then he'd go outside to play basketball or hang out with friends, or he'd play video games on the TV in his room.

For almost a year, the three, plus Tarrod's older cousin Darryl Glass, had lived in a small, beige house on Windsor Street, right across from Southwest Middle School, where Tarrod attended seventh grade. It was much closer to school than any of the other places they'd lived, and was a few blocks away from a park; a convenience store; and even Tarrod's 16-year-old cousin Jacari Glass, whom he'd met for the first time two years ago. And it was slightly bigger than their most recent place on Ariana Street. They'd been evicted from that apartment in February.

Ten years ago, mostly whites lived in the neighborhood, but that had begun to change. Black and Hispanic families populated the rentals and apartments. Southwest Middle drew from this area, reflecting big changes in the racial landscape of the county.

In 1990, there were 16,600 Hispanics living in Polk County, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2006, there were 81,646, an almost 400 percent increase. Blacks numbered 54,385 in 1990 and 76,978 in 2006, a 42 percent increase.

In this neighborhood, Tarrod and Kristian lived about a half-mile apart.

[ Shoshana Walter can be reached at 863-802-7590 or shoshana.walter@theledger.com. ]

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